Talk:AnortHea
AnortHea and its world Urdhe have been in development at various levels of intensity for going on twenty years now. It began as a fairly trite campaign fantasy world with the primary twists being the cold weather, the elusive nature of magic and the presence of people from our own world, but over time the world has developed its own history, languages, legends and peculiarities, which have never really emerged in the form of a specific narrative or other project. Currently the primary form of AnortHea is in the body of the Big Elsewhere Wiki, which periodically expands as I find the time to work on it. Rather than try to shift everything over from one site to another, I plan to let both this wiki and the BEWiki develop symbiotically -- I hope this isn't a breach of etiquette in some way, but nobody I've talked to thinks it would be. Further development related to AnortHea is also planned over at the ConLang Wiki. Currently I'm still very tentative about inviting open collaboration. There are certain foundations I'd like to lay down first, but I can't say how long that's going to take. For the present, just contact me either at my talk page or at sarai.te.sethura@gmail.com; if you use my email, be sure to put TBE in your subject line so I know it isn't spam. The surest way to get this show on the road more quickly is for someone to show interest in it. There are a few guidelines to keep in mind -- things important to the tone and scope of the world, but which may not be entirely clear from the existing material. * A tongue-in-cheek realism is the cornerstone of the setting. As far as possible, material for The Big Elsewhere is meant to appear non-fictional, exactly as though it were written in the fictional world presented. The intention of the BEWiki is to mirror exactly a tourist-oriented travel guide, written by people to whom travel to the Otherworld was the most awesome news ever back in the 80's, but has been a fact for more than twenty years now. Figures from the real world are freely worked in wherever they fit, along with real publications, television shows and incidents. This setting is strictly contemporary, and the calendar in the Big Elsewhere world keeps ticking along with real time. * A second major element is understatement. Discovery of the Otherworld was a major shock, and its ripples continue to rattle society today, but at the same time, it's not as though everyone got a free magic rainbow unicorn from it. The course of Earth history is not very much changed; contact with the Otherworld hasn't changed any Presidential elections nor brought about any global social revolution. There is magic in Urdhe -- or at least, there are divergent physical phenomena -- but it's elusive, often bogus, and even when genuine tends to be either frighteningly enigmatic or surprisingly ordinary. * In contrast, Urdhe is still a world of exotic beauty and wondrous phenomena, people with nonhuman folk, strange animals and things that appear to be real spirits, even Gods. AnortHean Craft-warriors carry out feats we only see in kung fu flicks over here, weavers spin spells into their works, and something appears to have put a genuine, mild curse on a former US President. With a small fleet of recommissioned B-17's, a UN joint operation helped take down a genuine Dark Lord in the mid-90's. Most of the spectacle takes place in the background, however, while the material tends to focus instead on practical, daily life matters; advice for tourists, hassles of living in a Gateway city, and the history of a little tavern called The Big Elsewhere. * Also playing in the background are a free play of references to other works, including strange parallels between the history of Gateway technology and events from WATCHMEN, and ongoing interconnections between reporter Beagle Harris, Hunter S. Thompson and a guy named Duke. These references should be kept unobtrusive and few, but they're a definite part of the setting. All that said, certain types of material are eagerly solicited, but send me at least a detailed outline of your ideas before writing it -- there are a lot of basic facts about the world which have been developed but not yet written out and posted, so there are a variety of reasons why an article might need extensive revision before fitting into the setting canon. Contributions I'd like to see include: * In-world fictional or media material -- TV shows, news reports, comics and articles from within the fictional world, dealing in some fashion with the Otherworld and its interaction with Earth. Scripts, images, text pieces, even videos or websites -- anything that makes the world appear more full and real is welcomed. * Science articles -- Earthling scientific study of Urdhe is slowly expanding, but it's continually held back by cultural misunderstanding and chronically underfunded. The basic way I see the "game" of writing science articles for The Big Elsewhere is for you to post, in as much detail as possible, about specific experiments and expeditions, while I -- based on what I already know about the world, and the limits of my own education -- respond with the results they obtain. By this approach I hope to keep participation in the project an active entertainment, and give participants a feeling of making genuine discoveries in a world of mystery. * Error patrol -- Nordiche and the other languages of Urdhe are still in development, so names and words periodically undergo revision, and with all the pages already written, I can't always find every instance of a word to replace it. If you spot different spellings or other factual differences between existing pages, please let me know so I can change the outdated ones. * Characters, places, and organizations of any type, Earthling or Urdhan. The Otherworld has at least seventeen million people on it and hundreds of millions of Earthlings have been affected by the Gateways; filling those worlds in is part of the broadest ambitions of the project. * And of course, stories. Works of fiction related to The Big Elsewhere won't be subject to the same editorial oversight as wiki articles, since after all plenty of fiction without the slightest accuracy is written within the setting. Aside from that, I hope you enjoy the material created so far and I hope it fires your imagination -- to join in, or to produce works of your own. Welcome to the Big Elsewhere! Jack Hare 06:09, 16 February 2009 (UTC)